Heart valve diseases are some of the most commonly diagnosed cardiac diseases in China, and some of them are found to be heart valve damage caused by rheumatic fever. In recent years, the continually aging population has driven an increasing incidence of valvular degeneration (including calcification, mucoid degeneration, etc.) and valvular damage caused by metabolic disorders in China.
Minimally invasive interventional surgery offers a variety of advantages, including needlessness of sternotomy, minimal patient trauma and quick recovery. In the recent ten years, the development shows that not only the diseases curable by traditional medical and surgical treatments but also some diseases that the traditional approaches could not handle can be treated by the interventional therapies. After entering the twenty-first century, researches on interventional therapies for valvular heart diseases have been experiencing a notable acceleration. Percutaneous valve implant techniques have evolved from experimental researches to small-scale clinical trials and are likely to have breakthroughs in technical “bottlenecks” to achieve extensive clinical applications. This makes the techniques again a focus of research efforts in the field of interventional cardiology.
CN101460115A describes a device for loading an interventional heart valve into a delivery system. The device is composed of an inflow cone 42, an inflow tube 38, an outflow cone 34, an outflow tube 40 and a cap 36. The interventional heart valve is crimped and introduced into the outflow cone 34 with the aid of the cap 36 such that one end of the interventional valve is compressed by the outflow cone 34. The inflow tube 38 is then inserted through an aperture of the cap 36 such that the compressed portion of the interventional valve is expanded to a size that is comparable to a size of a catheter of the delivery system, thereby allowing a stent of the interventional valve to be coupled to the delivery system. The delivery system is then manipulated to cause a sheath of the catheter and the outflow tube to move so as to allow the interventional valve stent to be partially loaded within the delivery system. Subsequently, the cap and the outflow cone are retrieved, and the other end of the interventional valve stent is compressed into the inflow cone. The remaining portion of the interventional valve stent is then reduced in size, and the delivery system is manipulated to receive the whole of the interventional valve stent. This device, however, requires complicated operations during its use in surgery.